


Sidekick

by TheSmudgyOne



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: 300 fox way, Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Childhood, Fluff, Gen, Little Kid Blue Sargent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-07 05:27:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1886748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSmudgyOne/pseuds/TheSmudgyOne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blue Sargent backstory. Pre-Raven Boys.<br/>Includes: Little Kid Blue. 300 Fox Way shennanigans. Growing up ordinary among psychics. Wanting "something more." And the reason why Blue makes a rule: stay away from Raven Boys, because they're bastards.</p><p>Disclaimer: The Raven Cycle and all TRC characters belong to Maggie Stiefvater.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1 of 3

When she was four years old, Blue Sargent started introducing herself to everyone by saying,  
"I'm Blue and I'm a Sidekick!"  
Plenty of people, upon hearing this, just smiled and said hello back. But sometimes, they said weird things, like,  
"Aw, I think you can do better than being a sidekick. You'd be the hero!" They said it as though sidekick was a bad thing.  
To this, she sighed with great impatience. Why did none of these grownups know what sidekick meant?  
"Sidekick means I can tell the future," she explained. "Everyone in my whole entire family is one. Me and my mom and my aunt Calla and my aunt Persephone and my cousin Orla and my aunt Neeve. My dog Buttons can too, i think. He can always tell when something yummy is in the oven, even before it comes out."  
And then the person would ask Blue to tell them their future. Blue would have been delighted to, but at this point, her mother or aunt would always rush them off or change the subject.  
Eventually, a kid in her neighborhood explained to Blue that "sidekick" was the person who stood off to the side and did little things to make a superhero look good. Or any hero. They were helpful, but not as good or cool or powerful as the superhero.  
"Oh!" Blue wrinkled her nose. "Well, that's not me then. Because I have a superpower!"  
She went home and got Persephone to teach her how to pronounce it right. She practiced in front of the mirror.  
"Sy-kick. Sy-kick....Psychic. Hi, I'm Blue, and I'm a psychic!"  
But still, her family looked upset when she said it.

When Blue was five, Calla and Blue's mother Maura had a fight. They yelled, and someone bumped a glass jar and it fell and smashed. The hallway where Blue eavesdropped filled with a sharp, bitter smell of herbs, and a few bits floated out into the hall. The bits drifted toward Blue. Blue pulled her t-shirt over her nose. The herbs made her eyes sting, but she squeezed them shut and kept listening.  
"She needs to know!" Calla said. "Are you just going to let her keep believing she's psychic forever?"  
"She's five," Maura said. "She still believes in Santa Claus, for heaven's sake."  
"Now, there's a parenting mistake if i ever heard one," Calla commented.  
"Oh, stop," Maura snapped. "She is five years old. I am not about to tell her she's the only person who is not psychic in a large family of psychics. She'd take it too hard at this age."  
And that was how Blue learned about Santa Claus, and about herself.

She decided to test it. But first came research. She was tiny enough to hide inside a cabinet in the Reading Room. It was dusty, and smelled of old wood. It felt homey in a fairy-tale way, like living inside of an enchanted tree.  
She spied through the keyhole. She watched the way her family worked. The way they handled the worn tarot deck, flipped cards, cut cards, the way they spoke. She hid in the closet in the phone/sewing/cat room and listened to Orla murmur "i'm having a psychic experience" into the phone on their psychic hotline.  
In her bedroom, Blue stood in front of the mirror and repeated in Orla's dreamy drawl,  
"Mmmmm. I'm having a psychic experience." She flipped and fumbled with tarot cards, she closed her eyes like her mother did in the middle of readings.  
She didn't feel any different.  
She asked for a diary for her birthday. It had a pattern of strange blue flowers on it, and she liked to run her fingers over the glossy cover. On the first page, Blue gripped her best gold crayon firmly and wrote in her best handwriting: MY PREDIKSHUNNS. This was how she would prove Calla and Maura wrong.  
At first, it was grand fun. She wrote things like "today i will eat something with cheese," then went to the fridge and found some mozzarella, and reveled in the delight that she was indeed psychic. She gleefully made detailed notes about the cheese in her book.  
But as she listened and thought hard in her Reading Room spying sessions, the flaw in the plan became clear. She could not stop at predicting her own future - she had to predict the future of other people.  
And though she tried and tried and tried, she could not.  
She ripped all the pages of Lunchtime Psychic Triumphs out of her notebook and shredded them into tiny pieces. She threw herself on the bed and cried. When customers came to the house for a reading, she casually mentioned how they kept pet boa constrictors (they did not, but she wanted one) and tarantulas (they did not, and that was okay) in an attempt to drive people away.  
Her palms had marks from when she squeezed her fists tight in jealous fury, seeing Orla twirling the phone cord in the phone/sewing/cat room and intoning, "i'm having a psychic experience." Her head hurt from glaring so viciously at them all. Her eyes were red from crying after satisfied customers came back to her mother, delighted, exclaiming how indeed, something terrible had happened involving the number seventeen, and thank you so much for the warning!  
Everyone was special except for Blue.

One day, a pipe burst and the only grown-up home was her mother, doing a reading. Blue banged into the reading room, drenched, and told Maura and a very startled little old lady with giant glasses. Instead of getting up to go see the pipe, Maura looked from Blue, to the old lady, to the tarot deck laid out on the table.  
"Touch my arm, Blue," her mother said in a soft, careful tone, like she was trying not to wake a sleeping child.  
Blue did.  
Maura looked amazed, but she didn't tell Blue why. However, the next time she had an important reading, she asked Blue to come and help.  
"What would I do?" Blue asked.  
"All you have to do is touch my arm."  
"Okay. Why?"  
Maura brushed a warm, soft hand across Blue's forehead and smiled. "You can make the powers of other psychics stronger. It's an amazing gift."  
Blue thought about this. "I just stand there while you tell the future?"  
"Yes. And you make it easier to see. Much easier!"  
Blue felt her face get red and hot. Her throat was doing the thing it did right before she cried. "I'd be your sidekick!" she said.  
Her mother looked stricken. "Blue, no-"  
Blue stomped up to her bedroom, pulled out her notebook and her glitter crayon, and began to make a list. She would be no one's sidekick. She was going to be a real psychic, just like them.

She began with her mother, because her schedule was easiest to predict. Blue marched up to her in the kitchen and said,  
"I'm going to tell your future!" and grabbed her palm.  
"Blue," Maura sighed, but Blue was already studying the lines of the palm.  
"Mmmmmm," Blue said. "I'm having a psychic experience." Maura began muttering angrily about Orla, but Blue ignored it. "In your future, I see.....something green. Green, and cold. And dangerous. It will come in threes."  
Maura looked down at Blue, startled.  
"Blue?" she said in a quivering voice Blue had never heard her use before.  
"See, mom? I'm psychic!"  
She left her mom in the kitchen, gaping. And she skipped off to retrieve three freshly-caught garter snakes from the box in her bedroom, and put them under Maura's pillow.  
After that, Maura had a Serious Talk with Blue about how it was very understandable that she wanted to be psychic too, but what Blue had done was wrong and scared her very much, and also could have really hurt someone if she'd gotten the type of snake wrong.  
"You think I did it?" Blue made her eyes big, pressed her hand to her chest like she was physically hurt. "I was in my bedroom writing in my psychic notebook!"  
Her mother told her she could not watch TV until she had apologized. When that didn't work, she revoked dessert, then some toys, and finally, horribly, books. But Blue did not break.  
Instead, she picked up speed. She strung tripwires of clear fishing wire across the hallways and warned people she saw a dangerous fall in their future. When people had appointments on the fridge calendar, she hid people's shoes and car keys and predicted they would be late. She predicted that Orla would have a terrible encounter involving "lots of legs", and then filled her shoes with spiders. Booby-trapped buckets of ice water popped up everywhere in the house, along with dire warnings from Blue about "something very, very cold."  
It was satisfying in a small way. (Especially the one about Orla's shoes.) Blue spent many hours plotting and giggling over this game. But it was still not something that made her special. She needed more. 

One day, when Blue was in the first grade, the car broke down as her mother was driving her home from school. Persephone showed up two minutes later in a car smelling of brown sugar and pecans. She looked small and worried.  
At home, the kitchen was full of grown-up talk about how much money it would cost to fix the car. Persephone started baking a pie, abandoned it, and started two others. The kitchen burst with clashing smells: fresh-squeezed limes, nutmeg, mashed banana, oregano, pumpkin, and a weird cheese. She asked for Blue's help with the crusts. Blue worked on them some, and peeled bites off and nibbled on them some.  
"How are we going to afford this?" Maura groaned, leaning against the counter.  
"I can do more readings. I can squeeze it in," Orla said.  
"I could do that as well," Persephone added.  
Blue stopped eating stolen bits of pie crust, and squinted at them.  
"You can't fix the car with magic. You don't have that kind of magic."  
Her mother laughed. "I wish! No, honey." Then she explained: "people pay us to do readings on the phone. The more time we spend doing readings, the more money we make."  
Somewhere in Blue's brain, there was a very small "click."  
She wiped her floury hands on her apron.  
"Excuse me. I have something very important to do." She marched out.


	2. Chapter 2 of 3

The next day was a school day. Blue brought a handmade sign in her backpack. It was written on a large sheet of posterboard, and folded up for secrecy.  
At lunchtime, Blue told everyone she knew that she would be doing something "very special" at recess, and where to find her. When the doors opened, Blue ran out with her sign. She climbed into the bushes on the edge of the playground, and propped up the sign in front of her hiding spot:  
PSYCHIC READINGS WITH  
BLUE SARGENT THE GREAT  
PRICE: 50 CENTS OR SOMETHING COOL  
A few kids wandered over and clustered around the bush. Blue could see their feet.  
"You're not really psychic," said a girl named Amanda. She had long, shiny blonde hair in french braids, and the kind of sneakers with lights that flashed every time you took a step.  
"You can go first," Blue said. "You have to pay up front. Please come into the Reading Room."  
Amanda climbed into the space in the bushes, which was just big enough for two people.  
Blue was ready. She had an old tarot deck, and also some fat litle tea candles. She lit the candles - Amanda looked very impressed at Blue for breaking such a big school rule - and went through the tarot ritual. When it was all laid out, Amanda said,  
"so what does it mean?"  
"It means that you're going to get a perfect score on your math homework all week."  
Amanda looked skeptical. "I never get good scores in math."  
But of course, the next day, Amanda got 100 percent on her math homework. And all the days that followed. During gym class each day, Blue faked sick, then found the worksheets in Amanda's backpack and corrected all the wrong answers.  
At the end of the week, Amanda and two other girls with light-up shoes came up to Blue at lunchtime. They were all beaming.  
"We want you to come sit with us from now on."  
"And," added Amber, a girl with sparkly glasses and hair that bounced with excitement, "will you do readings for us, too?" 

Business boomed for Blue Sargent The Great. This meant that Blue had to establish some ground rules. Rule number one: sign up for a reading at least one in advance. Rule number two: she only did one reading per day. And sometimes, she took a day off because her "psychic energy was low," a phrase she had learned at300 Fox Way. Only in Henrietta Elementary, "low psychic energy" meant that Blue hadn't had time to research the next person on her list.  
On a public library computer, Blue googled "how to pick locks" and was delighted with the useful results. She watched instructional videos and practiced. Then she signed up as a teacher's aide - someone who stayed after class a few minutes and cleaned up the room - and picked the locked drawer where everyone's grades were kept. Blue Sargent the Great could now tell kids exactly what grade they'd get.  
She also rooted through people's backpacks, read their daily journal entries from the creative writing books kept on a shelf in the classroom, snooped in their lunchboxes, listened to gossip, and googled their parents. She was very, very good.  
Whispers began to drift through the hallways like clouds of chalk dust. _Blue Sargent can tell your future. Blue Sargent has a magic power. Blue Sargent is a psychic. Blue Sargent is a real psychic._

Blue's mother continued to ask her to be present at readings. She always asked it as a question, never made it command. And Blue always refused.  
"I'm Blue Sargent the Great," she said, sticking her nose in the air.  
"You are great. Your attitude, however, is not."  
Calla added, "if you keep sticking your nose in the air like that, a demon will fly up through your nostrils and live in your sinuses forever."  
Persephone peered at Blue's feet. "Speaking of unwanted spirits, something inside your shoes is creating a flickering light in distressing patterns. Would you like me to do a smudging ritual?"  
Blue stomped her feet delightedly to make the lights blink.  
"Like them? All the cool kids wear them!"  
"Oh, dear," Persephone said. "I'll give you some herbs to take to school. Surely they'll let you burn herbs in the hallways for that?"

In the second grade, Blue increased her reading fee from "50 cents or something cool," up to "75 cents or something really really cool." In the third grade, she started getting reading requests from older kids. In the fourth grade, a young teacher with a face like a startled deer pulled her aside and asked for a psychic consultation, and paid her twenty dollars to ensure privacy. When she started middle school, Blue was worried that her star would fade. But she stole a copy of the roster of all locker combinations in the school, and dazzled everyone with the psychic knowledge she had obtained by rooting through the contents of their lockers. And the seventh grade, Blue achieved the ultimate in greatness.  
It happened before school. It was an unseasonably warm day in March, and everyone was hanging out outside, sitting in the grass and sharing headphones. Blue had just arrived at the shady tree that was the "cool kids spot," and all her friends were admiring her new flowered sundress. It was her latest purchase with her reading fees. (The fee was now 3 dollars for new customers, 5 dollars for return customers. She no longer accepted bags of goldfish crackers as payment.)   
A silver BMW with an AGLIONBY LACROSSE bumper sticker pulled up. A tall, dark-haired boy in a school uniform stepped out of the passenger seat. Everything about the boy looked like it had been plucked from the pages of a magazine. Just like the older boy in the driver's seat. Just like everything at Aglionby.  
All of Blue's friends started whispering. Blue nodded along with them, shrinking down in her seat a little. Boys were an increasing problem. All her friends had crushes, and it was an important conversation topic. This year, loads of people had pulled her aside and asked her to predict something about their love lives. Not just girls, either. Boys would slip her notes in class asking for a reading. They always wanted to meet in weird places no one would be - "meet me in the chem room that was closed-off to students because of asbestos" - so they wouldn't be seen asking a girl psychic about the big school dance. Blue had gotten a reputation for discretion.  
Blue tried to stick to celebrities when talking to her friends about boys. It was the safest way. She was never going to kiss Max Valentine, 15-year-old pop sensation with about 15 million fans, so she was free to go on at length about the way his hair swooped over one eye. She was never going to kiss anyone else, either, because she knew the rule: _if you kiss your true love, Blue, he'll die. So just to be safe, don't kiss anyone._  
So when Blue saw the Aglionby boy, she firmly turned her thoughts to psychic readings. Girls would come to her asking for readings about the raven boy. It was good that he was cute. He'd be good for business.  
The boy walked right up to Blue.  
"Blue Sargent," he said, staring down at where she sat on the grass. His smile was dazzling. Toothpaste-commercial dazzling. His tie was loose, and she wondered why she'd never thought about ties before. "come for a walk with me?"  
Blue pushed herself up from the grass in a way that allowed her to discreetly wipe the sweat off her palms. How did the boy know her name, and exactly where to find her?  
He walked her around the side of the school, and out onto the soccer field. It was silent and still, and smelled of fresh-cut grass. About halfway across the soccer field, Blue's heart began to feel like a car stereo with the bass boost up at max. Was this what she thought it was?  
When they reached the other end, he leaned against the goalpost.  
"Blue Sargent," he said. "I hear you have some interesting talents. Could I convince you to help me out?"  
Blue felt like she'd been dipped in gold. 


	3. Chapter 3 of 3

His name was Ashton. He was an eighth grader at Aglionby. They scheduled a reading for that day, after school. Blue would go over to his dorm room. Blue got there fifteen minutes early, wearing eyeliner and blush and glitter eyeshadow, all done by her squealing friends.  
It all played out exactly as planned. Blue had a glass bottle of lemonade with her, and "accidentally" knocked it over on the desk in such a way that it smashed. While he sopped up the mess, she dug the point of a piece of glass into her palm.  
"Oh, wow," she said, holding up her bleeding hand. Ever the gallant knight, he rushed off for band-aids and disinfectant, as if she couldn't get them herself. This gave her time to search his drawers. He possessed a large amount of little baggies of white powder, and a large pile of cash right next to it. She slammed the drawer shut just before he came back, and it took everything in her power to keep from bursting into a huge grin and punching her fist in the air. This was the big leagues. Big predictions.  
Because she'd seen one more thing, tacked up on the wall over his desk. A neon flier with an address circled. He was going to a party tonight.  
Blue lit candles for the reading. She predicted danger in his near future.  
"What kind of danger? Can you be more specific?" His voice was serene as a spoonful of honey. This was someone who was used to danger.  
She closed her eyes. The candles, which were stolen from the Reading Room, smelled like power. She spoke like someone just waking up from a dream.  
"I see light. It's nighttime, but there's a light. Not a still light - it's moving. Flashing. There's red. And there's something white in the air, too. Mist, maybe. Or....flour? And I see a room of people, running, pushing out a door."  
She opened her eyes. He was watching her like she was the best movie he'd ever seen. He asked for her phone number. Feeling daring, she took a marker and wrote it on his hand.  
At 10 PM, she called the cops on his party.  
At 10:15, he called her at 300 Fox Way.   
"Blue Sargent," he said, "you are fucking magnificent."

The next morning, Blue got up early to walk the dog of a sick neighbor. As she and Pebbles the Pomeranian strolled down the pollen-dusted sidewalk, they encountered a little girl tying her shoe. She looked about eight. When she looked up and saw Blue, her eyes got as big and round as tea candles.  
"You're Blue! Blue Sargent! Right? Right?"   
"Yeah, Hi. And this is Pebbles. What's your name?"  
"Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh! My name's Gabriella and you're the psychic, the really good one who does readings for everyone at your school!" Her hair was bouncing all over like it couldn't contain its excitement. Her "Gryffindor Quidditch" t-shirt blazed yellow in the sun.  
Blue nodded.  
The girl put her hand on her cheek like a cartoon of someone being surprised. "Whoooooa. Tell me ALL about it. Like, do you hear voices?"  
Blue laughed. "No, no voices."  
"Do you have other powers besides being psychic?"  
Blue blinked. "What do you mean?"  
The girl rolled her eyes. "Duh! Other magic. Can you cast spells? See ghosts? Vampires? Can you time travel? Do you know where to find any dragons? Or one of those holes where fairies kidnap and take humans, can you take me to one of those?"  
Blue held up a hand. "You think I can find dragons?" A wind blew, and pollen swirled and danced around her in dizzy patterns. The girl just put her hands on her hips and looked at her like of COURSE she did, so Blue said, "why?"  
The girl shrugged. "if psychics exist, so does other stuff people say is made up. Right?"

Ten minutes later, Blue banged through the screen door at 300 Fox Way. She was out of breath. Sweat ran down the sides of her forehead, but she didn't wipe it off. She thundered up the stairs two at a time, hit the landing - and stopped.  
Who to ask?  
Blue considered her options. Maura would look sorry for her. Persephone would be too vague in her answer. Orla would re-enact the conversation over the dinner table.  
Blue knocked on Calla's door.  
"It's open!" Calla called.  
Blue went in. Calla was sitting on the floor, surrounded by a half-circle of heaps and heaps of paper. The papers had all been folded in various ways and then unfolded again, so instead of stacking up neatly, they made messy, flopping piles. This was compounded by the fact that Calla had a fan blowing. Calla did not look up when Blue came in. She kept her fingers on a piece of paper, her eyes closed.  
"Calla!" Blue half-shouted. "There are lots of other types of magic in the world besides being a psychic. Right?"  
Calla didn't open her eyes. "If you're going to ask me insipid questions, my customer fees are listed on the sign by the front door."  
"I'm going somewhere with this, okay?"  
"Just a minute," Calla murmured.  
Frustrated, Blue peered at the papers. There were about three dozen piles, as well as a lot of strays, and Calla had used little piles of rocks as paperweights. Blue couldn't tell if it was ritual, or deliberate weirdness. Also weird was the fact that a lot of the papers were covered in large, angry strings of swear words. A few seemed to be splatterd with blood.  
"What is that?"  
"Author's hate mail," Calla said. "Tracing the source." Calla lifted her finger off the paper.  
"You could make so much money working for the cops. Most people here haven't even heard of psychometry."  
"You and Neeve would make quite a pair."  
Blue thought Neeve was brilliant, but she didn't argue the point.   
"Okay, so I was wondering - I know I won't be ever be psychic. But there are other types of magic! Like-" she was about to say dragons, but caught herself. All the examples would make her sound eight years old, so she just said, "But will I ever get to experience some other type of magic for myself? Not just helping other people be magic, but real magic for me?"  
Calla gave a dismissive wave of her hand.  
"You don't want to know too much of your future," Calla said. "You think you'll own it, but really it owns you."  
Blue rolled her eyes. "Okay, _Mom._ Now can you answer the question?"  
Calla considered Blue, frowning.  
"Your energy's far too clouded for me to be answering that kind of question. Fix it."   
"My- I don't know how to fix my energy! it's not exactly like fixing a broken toilet!"  
A wicked smirk crept across Calla's face. "Actually...." she seemed to be savoring every word. "It's exactly like fixing a broken toilet. You have to find out where it's clogged, and clear out all the-"  
Blue slammed the door.  
A moment later, as Blue stormed down the hall, Calla opened the door and poked her head out.  
"You'll have to answer the doorbell when it rings in a minute. And don't think of coming back in the house before doing a smudging ritual. You'll be crawling with unwanted spirits when you get back. It draws them in like a magnet."  
Blue tried not to ask, but-  
"'It' draws them in? What's _it?_ "  
Calla twisted up a smile. "Axe cologne."

Ashton took her around Aglionby, across sprawling green lawns and through loud dorm hallways, and introduced her to all his friends.   
"This is Blue. She's a psychic. No, man, a real one. How do you think I knew the cops were gonna bust that party? Blue. That's how. Yeah!"  
Gorgeous boys in polo shirts swarmed around her. They touched her shoulder. They held up hands for high-fives. They leaned in doorways in a way that made Blue wonder why she'd never noticed how boys lean. And all of them, all of them, wanted her phone number.   
She wrote it on scraps of paper, old math test, the covers of their trapper keepers, on the backs of their hands, and once, inside a school library copy of Don Quixote. She abruptly felt quite certain that she could rule the world with this sort of power. Anything she wanted, she could just make a wish and open her eyes. This was magic.   
Ashton led her into the sculpture garden. The fresh, pebbly paths were lined with intricate landscaping arrangements: a row of magnolia trees bordered by a row of landscaped bushes bordered by three rows of white tulips. Some of the sculptures were blobby modern art, some were pretty fountains, some were chalky white carvings of people. Blue wanted to stop and read the plaques, but knew better than to do such an uncool thing.  
The sculpture garden touched some border of the campus, and there was a little 2-foot-high white fence to mark the perimeter between it and the woods beyond. They stepped over it, and stood at the edge of the woods. Ashton stood close. Blue decided his cologne would only attract the best sort of spirits.  
"So," Ashton said. "I have a business proposal for you."  
"Okay."  
"But it's really private, so I want to pay you up front not to tell anyone." He started reaching into his back pocket, but Blue held up a hand.  
"No worries. I get loads of love life questions, and I never tell. You can pay me after you get your reading." She didn't like getting paid up front. It made her feel nervous and itchy, in case she couldn't accomplish the research to get the information she needed.  
"It's not a love life question," he said.  
"Okay," she said.  
He studied her face for a minute. Then he gave her a crooked smile that made her nervously touch her hair.  
"You're cool, Blue." Then he took a breath and dropped the smile. "Okay. So I'm in deep, to tell the truth. There's this scholarship kid who knows I'm dealing, and word has it, he's going to snitch on me."  
"Why?" Blue didn't have anything against someone reporting a drug dealer. But she wondered what on earth would make someone on scholarship - already on such delicate ground - get involved in a drug scandal, even if they weren't the one committing the crime.  
"I know, right? What's the big deal?" he gave a conspiratorial grin. "It's just a little fun. So anyway. Normally, I could just call dad, get him to make a donation, no worries. But I've already had to do that three times, and he says he's not doing it again. And I've been expelled from two other private schools."  
His voice sounded like he was leading up to asking for some sort of help. Blue wanted to point out that there was little a psychic could do to help besides tell him whether he was going to get kicked out or not. But she waited.  
"So-" he smirked a little - "my lacrosse buddies and I are going to get the little snitch expelled. And that's where you come in."  
Blue said nothing. She must have looked horrified, because he said,  
"Don't tell me you have a moral problem with this."  
Blue fiddled with her hair. "Just surprised that- that- he doesn't seem like a kid who would have any infractions. That's what you were going to have me do, right? Tell you if he'd broken any rules?"   
He took a lock of hair she'd been fiddling with and held it in his own hand. "God, you are so cute." He dropped the hair. "Nope, we've gotta make our own. So we're going to steal a bunch of test answers, plant them in his locker, and get someone to do a random locker search. And with you there, we won't get caught. You're the lookout who sees things before they can be seen!" he grinned like he'd made a great joke.  
Blue pressed her lips together. She wiped her palms on her skirt.  
"Look. I'll do a reading to see if he's broken any rules for real. If he has, I have no problem telling you about it. But I don't want to do - that - if he's innocent."  
Ashton looked genuinely shocked. He probably didn't get told no by many people. "But - come on, Blue! I'll pay you any price. Literally, name your price. And when you're in high school, I'll buy you a car! You are so, so good at this Blue. There may be other people out there who can do what you do. But-" he touched her hair again- "you're the only one i'd want as my sidekick."  
Blue blinked. "Psychic."  
Ashton looked puzzled for a moment, but said, "oh, cute pun! Yeah, I said side-kick, but it does sound just like psychic, doesn't it?"  
Blue took a step back from him. Then another. She wished, so desperately, more than anything in the world, for the magic power to keep her face from turning bright red when she was upset. But she didn't have that.  
"No," she said. She clenched her teeth, but her voice quivered anyway. "No. Gotta go."  
With one little twist, Ashton's smile turned ugly.   
"Oh, okay," he said. "Run along. And I'll tell everyone at school that you're a fake. And who are they going to believe - the girl claiming to be psychic, or the most popular 8th-grader at Aglionby?"  
Blue felt tears well in her eyes. But she knew she wouldn't do it, and it was better to go sooner than later. Just before the tears fell, she turned and ran.

The first thing she did was cut her hair. She didn't pay to get it done, and she didn't ask her mom or aunts or even a friend to do it. She just grabbed her scissors and started hacking. She didn't stop until she had a weird, choppy, above-chin-length cut. Then, more slowly, she fixed the uneven bits, and did a sort of layer-y thing, until it looked less "hatchet job" and more "this is a funky and creative hairstyle that you, preppy person, could not understand the artistry of." She hoped.  
It felt remarkably good to cut her hair. The sound of the slicing scissors, the feel of permanently chopping something off. She flipped the dial on her staticky radio until she found a station playing something angry with lots of electric guitars, and turned it up.   
She did her clothes next. She got a needle and thread from the phone/sewing/cat room, and she turned her sunny, sweet, safe clothes into weird, funky-looking things that looked like something you'd find permanently abandoned in the lost-and-found at an art school.  
But Blue decided she didn't mind. Well, okay, she ordered herself not to mind. Well, actually she definitely did mind. But she saw how, eventually, she wouldn't.  
She didn't have to be psychic to see it all play out. She'd be iced out at school. She'd get ordinary jobs walking neighborhood dogs and tutoring third-graders in math. She'd stop picking locks and helping people cheat. She'd spend more time on her homework, and more time hanging out at 300 Fox Way. She'd get better grades. She'd bake pies with Persephone. And she would go back into the Reading Room and lay her fingers on her mother's arm. Because she would never experience real magic, but there were other kinds of magic in the world, and choosing the right people was one of them.  
Blue hacked away at a flowered sundress, then picked up a needle to sew the pieces back together in all the wrong directions to make a weird skirt-thing. As she picked it up, she pricked her finger on the needle. She wasn't even sewing. She didn't even fumble it. She just picked it up and somehow ended up with a big blood drop right in the tip of her finger.  
It struck her as something out of a fairy tale - it was all very Sleeping Beauty - but then she remembered not to think like that and got up for a band-aid. That's when she saw the paper.  
There was a folded piece of printer paper on the nightstand with "NO MORE FREE READINGS" written on it in Calla's scrawl. Blue opened it.

Yes.  
-Calla  
P.S. I told you it was just like fixing a toilet.

Blue let out a delighted yelp. She tossed the note on the bed and clattered downstairs. Her mind whirled with questions. When? What? Where? Can I speed it up? Should I carry any supplies with me at all times incase of sudden quests or need for self defense or battle wounds or herbs or-  
Blue screeched to a halt in the hallway. She could see down the hall into the kitchen doorway, and the utter normalcy of the image stopped her in her tracks. Persephone was gently pressing pie ingredients into unwilling hands, and the whole place stank of weird, unrecognizable herbs. Calla was there, along with everyone else. And they all looked so ordinary and unfussed.   
Blue, panting in the hallway, realized that they probably knew everything that happened to her before it happened. At least, everything important. And probably everything that would happen to themselves as well. Maybe. Possibly. Did they ever get surprised? Ever feel a rush of delight, like Blue felt now from seeing that note? And did they ever feel like anything truly belonged to them, or did they just feel like pre-arranged pieces in a bigger game?  
Blue took a steadying breath. She walked into the kitchen and said,  
"I'll do the crust."  
As the years went on, she would ask them plenty of questions. She would ask if it would rain, or if she'd have a pop quiz. She would ask whether people would make fun of her at school today, and if she'd win an essay contest, and what she'd be asked at a job interview.   
But she never asked them a single question about the magic that waited in her future.


End file.
